Ramblings of a post-denominational frummer yid. Comments to benchorin613@yahoo.com

Friday, April 30, 2004

Spent over three hours yesterday at vaadat chukah in the Knesset. Their eminences Aharon Barak and Meir Shamgar came to remind the MKs how important it is that they quickly pass a constitution that cedes even more power to the Supreme Court. Barak sternly reminded them that many people haven't yet "internalized" the constitutional revolution that has taken place here. It didn't cross his mind that this failure to internalize might be somehow related to the fact that this revolution is entirely his own doing. The main Basic Laws he uses as a wedge to dictate policy to the government and Knesset are two laws passed in 1992 with fewer than 20 MKs even present at the vote. That non-event has been used by Barak to hysterically expand the powers of the court to include broad powers of judicial review. Imagine the nerve of some MKs not to have internalized all this. Anyway, in the civilized world every court that has powers of judicial review is appointed by elected representatives of the people. Only in Israel and India do judges decide who other judges will be. To be exact, there is a committee of nine that decides judicial appointments here. This includes three sitting judges (all leftists), two lawyers appointed by the Bar(at least one of whom is a leftist), two MKs (at least one leftist by law, since one must be from the government and the other from the opposition), the Justice Minister and one other minister. Obviously, the judges -- who always collude -- are never saddled with anyone they don't like. If they all thought the world was flat, we'd only have Flatearthers for ever and ever. So anyway, Shamgar -- whom I used to think had more sechel -- issues a pronunciamento that the courts must be independent so ideally we ought to have no politicians involved in the appointments process. These people really believe that imprinting their own biases on the court forever is more democratic than letting elected representatives decide such matters. They are convinced that they suffer no biases; they are simply objective professionals dispensing Justice. The rest of us are a bunch of impressionable over-politicized dolts. Scary.